We performed a comparison between Apica and AppDynamics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day."
"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."
"It is easy for beginners to learn and use Apica."
"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."
"One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally."
"The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integrate with other tools with a separate execution environment. The tool is also easy to use."
"It is easy to set up and configure."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"Technical support is helpful."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"Error analysis in the troubleshooting sections go straight to the point."
"Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results."
"In AppDynamics, everywhere I go, there's some sort of grouping and aggregation function, or there's some sort of timeline that lets me zero in more quickly on the traces that I need. They go to more pains to aggregate and bubble the important ones to the top. That removes a lot of manual work."
"AppDynamics makes it much easier for us to detect problems or issues before they become problems. We have alerting on all of our business transactions."
"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."
"It is a good monitoring tool. Its stability is very good."
"Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement."
"If you are adding any input file, the tool fails to capture the path."
"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents."
"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."
"I have noticed that the tool isn't widely recognized outside our organization. Also, there aren't any tutorials or dedicated resources for this tool, making it challenging for newcomers to learn. It would be beneficial if someone experienced with it could provide guidance."
"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do."
"The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see."
"It is stable, but the only downside is the licensing part."
"AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics."
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."
"There could be some improvement in the constructions of the diagrams, it is too difficult currently."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer."
Apica is ranked 45th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 6 reviews while AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews. Apica is rated 8.2, while AppDynamics is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Offers transcript download feature and easy to set up and configure tests but not very user friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". Apica is most compared with Datadog, Dynatrace, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and New Relic. See our Apica vs. AppDynamics report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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